Jumbo Comics #8

We rejoin Hawks facing 20 to 1 odds on board an enemy vessel -- and those are not good odds for a 3rd-level Fighter with no armor and armed with a sword, even if he does get to combat machine these guys. Luckily, a quick-thinking supporting cast member creates a trap for the opposition by turning a sail into a net. Nets seem to be particularly effective in comic books. Whatever the size of the net, half that space below it will be covered in net and all in that area must save vs. science or be trapped underneath for 1-3 turns (you can see the two who made their saves here).

I'm less charitable to the use of the cloak during the fight; I really don't see what game mechanic advantage to give to someone fighting with a sword in one hand and a blinding cloak in the other. Hawks' player is going to have to choose between the two each turn. On turns Hawks uses the blinding cloak, his opponent will, if he's hit, have to save vs. science or lose his attack that turn. It's not an effective attack, but more of a delaying move, really.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, time I see a half-pint kicking a mobster in the shin and disabling a grown man. Half-pints might need a special power of getting a +1 to hit mobsters in the shin, requiring a save vs. science if they hit or the mobster is stunned for 1 turn.

This is a special feature related to the World's Fair. Frank Buck reminds me that cobras and pythons need to be statted for Hideouts & Hoodlums 2nd ed. Pythons were not singled out by name in 1st ed., but there were stats for regular constrictor snakes. 2nd ed. will have stats for both regular and giant constrictor and poisonous snakes. I might include a note about how cobras can be caught in a sack, if you beat them in initiative and successfully hit them with the sack.

Is Wilton taking a risk, bringing Snorty back to town to see a doctor, or is he close to leveling and looking for that 100 XP good deed award for fixing up Snorty? Plus another bonus for including a supporting cast member in the story?

Ignoring the fact that Doogah looks more like a Muppet than a real person, this page is worth pointing out for the new trophy item -- the language chair. Anyone putting on the attached helmet and sitting in the chair will immediately learn the language of the next person to speak to him.

Here is an Editor at work trying to balance the challenge level of this scenario. Knowing that he plans to put Sheena and Bob up against a machine gun, he makes sure they have access to grenades to even the odds.

In this instance, Bob is not rescuing Sheena for a good deed XP award, since it does not count towards saving fellow Heroes. Instead, Bob is just playing smart and working to keep his comrade-in-arms alive.

That Bob is able to rush into the line of fire of the machine gun, pick up Sheena, and run out either means the Editor has rolled horribly for that machine gunner, or he's being too merciful to his players and deliberately unbalancing his game.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Jumbo Comics #5

Welcome to 1939!  We start the year off returning to Fiction House already and their premier title, Jumbo Comics. What can we learn from this issue that we can apply to Hideouts & Hoodlums?

In Hawks of the Seas, Will Eisner was reinventing the pacing of comic book stories. Here we see one of, if not the, first use of a cutaway scene within a page to something else going on that the reader needs to see, but the main character has no knowledge of.

These intermissions are a useful narrative tool, but a H&H Editor will have to think hard about whether to use them in a campaign. Will the players benefit from understanding the Editor's story better, without using their player knowledge to their advantage? It takes a mature group of players to be able to play that way.

Further, this issue marks the first time we've really had a good sense of where Hawks of the Seas takes place. It always seemed to be the West Indies, but now we can narrow it down to the Bahamas.

Dr. Snyde here kills one of his own henchmen with a single blow, which should be impossible in H&H -- he would be unconscious and need a second blow to kill him. Of course, perhaps a second blow occurs between panels. Or maybe the "not yet dead at zero hp" rule needs to be amended so it does not apply to non-Heroes. Or, maybe this needs to be a special rule where master criminals can kill their own henchmen automatically.

It seems clear that Budah is meant to be a djinn, which means that djinn cannot be hit by normal weapons (or at least Budah can't).

It's interesting that the trap can be deactivated and escaped just by touching sections of the wall.  It seems particularly odd since people trapped in a flooding room would naturally be touching the walls, either trying to find a way out or try to climb out. I would allow two search rolls in this case, one for each spot (opening the door without turning off the water first could make for a very wet hideout!).

I've previously discussed what to call the type of thing that Zula is. He was called a bogeyman previously by another character, but in this issue the narrator specifically calls him a monsterman.

There is a lot of visual detail here for describing the dressing in a mad scientist's laboratory.

The robot here is said to be 30' tall, but it seems even the narrator is exaggerating, because it only appears to be twice as tall as Zula. Since the robot can shoot lightning, I would suggest it is a huge version of a copper robot, as detailed in Book II: Mobsters and Trophies).

Though scientists suspected the moon was barren and lifeless in 1939, it couldn't prove this was true yet. That left a lot of leeway for making the moon anything you wanted it to be. If you want there to be valleys filled with cream cheese and giant lettuce plants, or just wind, water, and trees like on Earth, then you can do that in a Golden Age campaign.

This is clearly not Will Eisner, but I wonder if it inspired his strip, Espionage, for Quality?  ZX-5 acts a lot like Black X here, and his exchange with the unnamed highness reminds me of the chemistry between Black X and Madam Doom.

For H&H purposes, I want to point out the battle of bluffs going on here. In certain editions of certain games, one would resolve this with rolling dice, higher bluff roll wins. I am glad H&H isn't like that. I am much more interested in seeing how a player responds to a bluff, and how well he or she can bluff back. I would probably still roll an encounter reaction roll, but try to factor that in to a reasonable response to the bluff in that situation.

Here we seem to have examples -- albeit racist ones -- of bloodthirsty hoodlums (which first appeared in The Trophy Case, but also snuck into one earlier printing of Book II).  Ali Pasha also seems to be demonstrating psionics; it looks a lot like Mass Domination.  Am I going to have to include psionics in 2nd edition?

 Lastly, this is from Wilton of the West, and we get to see that old chestnut -- the "shoot your own arrow" trick. Lucky dice rolling, or flavor text? This would be up to the Editor. Is it important to the story that Wilton split his arrow to impress the other guests? Then his player could be asked to roll to attack the target (with the same AC to hit the bulls-eye as it was the first time).  If not, then this is just something to do while waiting for the encounter at the end of the page and can be hand-waved as successful.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Jumbo Comics #2

I wonder if anyone will ever run a funny animals campaign using Hideouts & Hoodlums?  In Peter Pupp, which we looked at with issue #1, all the elements of an action adventure scenario are here -- they can just be greatly exaggerated and make no sense. I would normally discourage an Editor from treating a weather control mad science device (as found in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies) from being able to affect the entire planet from space -- but in this sort of campaign it could.

Supplement III: Better Quality talked about various environments an Editor could use in a campaign and one environment that was cut and put in The Trophy Case v. 1 no. 6 was the "aerial wilderness".  I wrote "While no Golden Age comics of my acquaintance ever picked up on this notion" -- but I was unaware of Peter Pupp at that time. Clearly, the idea of exploring solid clouds has precedence here, as does hillbilly cloud giants...

I don't normally have my players stumble across mysterious Magic-Users handing out magic rings, but if I did decide, in mid-scenario, that some upcoming encounters were going to be too tough for them, I could see this as being a possible solution. A Ring of Djinni Calling is very apropos for H&H. I used a similar item recently in one of my campaigns (but it was a bottle instead of a ring), and like Peter Pupp's ring it only had a limited number of uses/charges.

The Hawk, always a class act, is here the very definition of Lawful Alignment as he consuls his men on "no wanton looting or unnecessary shooting".

I've said before that rappelling by rope should be easy for Heroes, except on challenging surfaces like a wet wall -- but here we have ten supporting cast all easily climbing a wall, while soaking wet from head to toe. Does climbing need to be automatic for everybody?

I'm not sure yet how I'd wind up statting this guy. This is the first appearance of a character called Mr. Eternity, who seems to be able to control his own shadow -- making it grow, move, etc. He also claims to be Death itself, but this bears further investigation.

This is from the continuing origin story of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. The witch doctor tells of casting a Curse spell (Remove Curse reversed?). It's unclear if he wields actual magic or if Sheena's father died coincidentally, but if is magic, then a Bestow Curse spell can be lethal.

Somehow, ZX-5 is able to look at the car behind him, see the enemy agents discussed as policemen, and tell that they are agents in disguise on sight.  This has got to be a special ability for spies.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Jumbo Comics #1 - part 1

I've been doing this for almost a whole year now and, during this run of examining the comics from 1935-1938, there have never been more than seven U.S. companies publishing at a time (and I only have access to five). So it's a Christmas treat to finally read the first comic book from "new" publisher, Fiction House. There's some familiar stuff here -- Will Eisner's "Hawks of the Seas" picks up right where it left off in Quality's Feature Funnies, Bob Kane starts his second pre-Batman feature, Peter Pupp, Mort Meskin is the first artist on Sheena Queen of the Jungle, and future comic book virtuoso Jack Kirby debuts with an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.

I don't share a lot of funny animal strips here, but when they are focused on adventure I will. Some campaigns begin loosely, with some optional directions for the Heroes to take it in. Some campaigns (the "sandbox" campaign style) sets up all the options for the campaign in advance and lets the players decide entirely on how to explore it. What happens to Peter Pupp is the complete opposite -- before he's had more than a moment to roleplay, he's kidnapped in his sleep and taken on his first quest.

One of the benefits of not taking your Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign too seriously is that you can do anything with it? Want them to go to the moon to find out if it's made of cream cheese? Just put them in a rocket ship and fire them out of a giant cannon at the moon? Now, if you want to give them control over the rocket, you can plop other destinations in Earth orbit, like these totally impossible plantetoids. Remember, even though astronomy said this wasn't so, no one had yet been to space to find out for sure, so all this science stuff could be taken with a grain of salt (heck, some people still live this way!)

Moon rockets were introduced into H&H in Supplement III: Better Quality.

We don't actually see any of Spencer Steel on this whole page, but we do get a glimpse of a villain hideout, accessible through a garage with a sound-activated door. In the private office is a secret door that leads to an elevator that does down to an underground laboratory (stairs go back up, presumedly to a floor in between). There's a nice amount of detail to the lab here, handy for an Editor looking to describe one on the fly.

This is some of the earliest Joe Simon/Jack Kirby art in print, three years before Captain America. You can see some detail of a mad scientist's mind transfer machine here.  Mind transfer devices were introduced back in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies.

Hypnosis is currently a 1st level power for Superheroes. But does it need to be a skill that everyone has a chance to use? Though, if Kromo is a supervillain, maybe that explains his goofy name...

This is the cave-throne room of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Though the ceiling is festooned with stalactites, the floor has been cleared and smoothed. There is a dais and throne and -- more importantly -- note the oriental urns on either side of the room...

Clues explained on this page!  Note that, although Persia was officially called Iran since 1935, it was still commonly called Persia in the West for many years afterwards.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)